However,--the train started after a few moments and soon we were speeding through that low flat country which lies between Calais and Paris. It was a five-hour run direct, but we were going to stop off at Amiens to see the great cathedral there. I was struck at once by the difference between the English and the French landscape. Here the trees were far fewer, and what there were of them were not tinged with that rich green mold which is characteristic of every tree in England. The towns, too, as they flashed past--for this was an express--were radically different in their appearance. I noted the superabundance of conical red roofs swimming in a silvery light, and hard white walls that you could see for miles. No trees intervened to break the view, and now and then a silvery thread of a river appeared. It was on this trip that I gathered my first impressions of a French railway as contrasted with those of England and America. The French rails were laid to the standard gage, I noticed, and the cars were after the American not the English style: large, clean, commodious, with this improvement over the American car that they were of the corridor and compartment style as contrasted with our one room, open-space style. After my taste of the compartment car in England I was fairly satisfied to part forever with the American plan of one long open room in which every one can see every one else, interesting as that spectacle may be to some. The idea of some privacy appealed to me more. The American Pullman has always seemed a criminal arrangement to me, anyhow, and at Manchester I had met a charming society woman who in passing had told me that the first time she was compelled to undress in an American sleeping car she cried. Her personal sense of privacy was so outrageously invaded. Our large magnates having their own private cars or being able to charter a whole train on occasion need not worry about this small matter of delicacy in others (it would probably never concern them personally anyhow) and so the mass and the unsuspecting stranger is made to endure what he bitterly resents and what they never feel. I trust time and a growing sense of chivalry in the men at the top as well as a sense of privilege and necessity in the mass at the bottom will alter all this. America is a changing country. In due time, after all the hogs are fed or otherwise disposed of, a sense of government of the people for the people will probably appear. It has made only the barest beginning as yet. There are some things that the rank and file are entitled to, however--even the rank and file--and these they will eventually get.